A staph infection had me waiting in the ER on Christmas

I had a more exciting holiday than I had intended. For the last few weeks, I had thought that there was a spider in my bed that couldn’t resist biting me. When two of those bites became infected, I was on my way out of town to go home for the holidays. I had the joy of sitting in urgent care waiting rooms to have the abscesses drained and checked for 4 of the 6 days I was out of town. Since only the ER clinic was open on Christmas day, I went there for my last clinic visit and was told that they likely weren’t spider bites, but instead MRSA, or a staph infection.

When you hear about MRSA in the news you think of the kind people get in hospitals, the “super-bug” that is resistant to most drugs and requires IV antibiotics to get rid of it. Fortunately for me, I had community-acquired MRSA, which you get from a cut or an insect bite, and it can be treated with regular antibiotics. A lot of people carry around this bacteria all of the time and don’t experience any problems, but in my immune-suppressed state from taking 6-MP, this was how I spent my winter vacation.

On my first clinic visit, I was given antibiotics even though they offered to drain my infected “bite.” I was happy to take the antibiotics and run because while I find needles to be no big deal, slicing any part of me open with a scalpel freaks me out – a lot. After a considerable amount of freaking out and frantic Googling of “incision & drain,” I resigned myself to the slicing two days later.

When I was little, my parents had to literally chase me around the lab to catch me and pin me down for someone to draw blood. During my teenage years, I dreaded getting my diphtheria/tetanus booster shot when I turned 18, because I was still afraid of needles. After being in a hospital for a few weeks with a central line, I.V. infusions, finger sticks for glucose tests and generally poked with every other needle known to man – I got over my fear of needles. This made me realize that there has to be some desensitization process for this kind of stuff. Along the same lines, when someone has been through many surgeries, “the knife” isn’t as big a deal anymore – not that you would look forward to it, but you aren’t petrified by the thought of it. Needless to say, I’m still afraid of the knife…but it’s not quite as scary as it was a few weeks ago.